----- Original Message ----- From: "Derek Atkins" <derek@ihtfp.com> Subject: Re: A Trial Balloon to Ban Email?
OTOH, I still think a micro-payment postage system is a better idea. The sender puts a micro-payment into the mail header to pay the recipient to accept/read the message. For non-spam, the receipient doesn't need to cash the payment (or can just return it to the sander). For spam, the receipient collects the money (thereby costing the spammer real $$$ to send spam, if most receipients actually collect). The only remaining architectural problem is how to handle mailing lits.
So you're expecting that everyone will be honest about cashing micropayments? That seems rather silly, if such a mechanism were to become required on the internet I'd simply retire today, sign my email accounts (all except 1) up on every spam list, every mailing list, everything that would get me thousands of tokens a day, have an automated script cash all the tokens for me, and I'm generally considered fairly scrupulous. Additionally there is one major flaw in your design, what's to stop the spammers from using fake micropayments? The fact that people who believe it is spam will be unable to cash them? Like they really care about the people who delete their email. Or were you planning on every intermediate mail forwarder (all 14 of them between your sending and my recieving on this list) taking the time out of their busy schedule to verify the micropayments. It won't work, the micropayment will be widely reused anyway, the spammers depending on the bulk of the sends reaching their targets before the micropayment is cashed. This will in turn increase the burden on the intermediate servers; because the spammers obviously have to send out far more now (because so many of their messages never reach the servers), and the servers need to verify the payments (otherwise the payments mean nothing). The entire solution only raises the backlog of spam, raises the requirements for intermediate servers, raises the requriements for end servers, and introduces new methods of mass abuse. Doesn't exactly sound like something I want sitting on my network. Joe